


But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci

by Mortissimo



Series: ITDCAU [1]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Batman Fusion, Comic Book Science, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Established Relationship, Ghost Stanley Uris, I Don't Even Know, M/M, Multi, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 20:33:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24452947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo
Summary: Dr. Edward Kaspbrak, better known in Gotham as Scarecrow, receives a very strange phone call while temporarily in residence at Arkham Asylum, and may or may not make a huge mistake by asking the Joker to help him escape.After that, things get really, really weird.Batman/DC fusion/AU.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Series: ITDCAU [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1785373
Comments: 9
Kudos: 48





	But Doctor, I Am Pagliacci

**Author's Note:**

> Please see end notes for details on warnings. 
> 
> Please note also I didn't read the book, because I don't actually like Stephen King. I don't like the Joker either. Why am I here?

It was never a good sign at Arkham when the orderlies came especially for you. Best-case scenario, Edward mused, watching them fumble with the door, was maybe he'd somehow gotten lucky, one of his pending cases had gotten thrown out and some idiot had submitted him to the parole board on a technicality. But the likelihood of that happening again was, he had to admit to himself, pretty low. What seemed more likely was that they'd thought of some brand-new, Geneva-convention-flouting 'treatment' for his 'condition' (read: cruel and unusual punishment). 

"Well," he snapped as soon as the last lock popped, leaning back on his hands on his bunk, "what do we have today, boys? Electro-convulsive therapy again? Ice bath? Or something more medieval than Victorian?" Not that any of it was going to help because, of course, there wasn't really anything wrong with Edward. The orderlies said nothing, parting to let the nurse behind them look him over.

"Your treatment has been rescheduled. You have a telephone call, Dr. Kaspbrak," she simpered at him, and Edward could feel his eyebrows knitting together over the beginnings of a headache. The orderlies were nobody, but this particular nurse he knew. She seemed to have ambitions toward being his Harley Quinn, which was as insulting as it was laughable. He didn't need a _sidekick._

"Fine." Edward pushed himself to his feet and held his wrists out for the orderlies to clasp on restraints. "I'll take it in the drawing room." It was a test, voice raised, and sure enough he heard a muffled snicker from the cell next door. So his neighbor was still there, which meant conversation today would be immature garbage, but if the phone call turned out interesting, Edward always had a better chance of escape with the guy who treated Arkham Asylum like a revolving door. 

The orderlies took Edward to the phone with a minimum of fuss, which was one of the benefits, he guessed, of looking relatively nonthreatening out of his work clothes. It was easy to make people forget about last November when they had to look down to talk to you. Well. Not the parole board, but other people, sometimes. 

The phone itself was an exposed and impersonal pedestal at the end of the hallway. Edward picked it up gingerly and held it an inch or so from his ear—you never knew who'd had it last, and some of Arkham's inmates oozed.

"This is Dr. Kaspbrak," he said, and for nearly a minute he got no answer at all. Just as he was about to turn and dig into the orderlies for cutting off the line before he could get to it, he heard a sharp inhalation on the other end. 

"It's really you, huh Eddie?" The voice was soft enough he had to move the phone a little closer to hear, and unseen he rolled his eyes at the nickname. 

"It's Dr. Kaspbrak, yes."

"Jesus Christ. I didn't believe it on the news, but hearing you… I guess I didn't want to believe it, but it's true." Edward resisted the urge to bang his head against the wall, but only barely. 

"Look, who is this? I have a busy schedule of nothing to get back to, so if you're going to waste my time–"

"It's Mike. Sorry. Mike Hanlon, from Derry." 

"Maine?" It came to him in a flash: he'd grown up there, hadn't he? Edward glanced sidelong at the scar bisecting the palm curled around the receiver. They never stayed with him long, the flashes of memory from the black hole that had been his childhood. Since the procedure they'd been even less frequent, but something about Mike's voice stuck a chord that echoed in the empty places where his memories belonged.

"Yeah, Maine. Look, I just… I'm trying to get everyone back together, and I can't track Richie down at all, and Stan sounded… Bad. I don't know if we can do this without everyone, but we've got to try." Edward went cold all over. For the first time in years, he could remember the feeling of his heart hammering with something other than anger or exertion. The deep, mellow voice was new, but the longer Mike talked, the more bits and pieces Eddie could pick out of the nothingness that was his childhood, and the better he could match the voice to its 13-year-old counterpart. Of course he remembered Mike, something in him said, though he had no image of the guy. And Stan… Uris? 

And–

Fuck.

Oh _fuck._

"What are you talking about, Mike?" Eddie rasped, dreading the answer for reasons he could only barely remember.

Mike thought a long time before he spoke, long enough that Eddie wasn't sure if he'd hung up or not. 

"I didn't tell the others yet, but… It's back, Eddie. We need to kill It again." 

"Shit." Eddie dragged a hand down his face, then grimaced as the gesture knocked the phone in his linked hand against his forehead. 

"I uh… I understand if you can't make it, but the rest of us are meeting at Jade of the Orient in two days. You remember?" He did. Too much and, infuriatingly, not nearly enough. 

"I'll call you back," Edward promised baselessly, and hung up before Mike could respond. 

Well, it looked like he was going to need his neighbor's help after all. 

Lunch at Arkham was almost always chaotic and ill-advised, and though today was probably no exception, Eddie found himself walking through it in a daze. Although his conversation with Mike was already hovering at the edge of his memory, there were things needling at him he just couldn't forget, little fragments of memory that would creep up on him and hunch his shoulders, set his heart racing. Eddie hated it. He'd come too far and given up too much to let some demon clown drag him back into childhood anxiety he could barely remember. Blood oath aside, Edward was going to kill that clown on principle.

Speaking of…

As they did most days, the rest of Arkham gave Edward's neighbor a wide berth in the cafeteria, which was probably sensible considering the things Edward had seen him do with mashed potatoes. Edward, having worked with him off and on for going on a decade now, did not have the same qualms, and slid onto the bench next to him. 

"Good afternoon, Dr. Scarecrow," his neighbor said, elbowing him in the ribs, and Edward felt that familiar odd twitching down of his eyebrows and twitching upward of the corners of his mouth.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Joker," Edward answered, "how do you feel about applying for a day pass?" 

"Why Dr. Scarecrow, I thought you'd never ask!" 

And after this long, leaving Arkham was pretty much as easy as that. 

* * *

The downside to this plan, as it turned out, was that the Joker ended up wanting to go with him. 

"You do remember I said I was going to Derry, right? Small town in Maine nobody gives a shit about? Why are you trying to go to _Derry_? I don't even want to go to Derry!" Joker reached out to pinch his cheek, cackling as Edward slapped his hand away with a scowl.

"I would like to _live_ long enough to _get there_ though, dipshit." In the passenger seat, Joker trailed off into snickering, staring out at the road with a blank grin.

"I just want to see the kind of place they build 'em like you, Scarecrow. Must be a hell of a town."

"You're gonna be disappointed," Eddie snapped. "Nobody there is like me."

For all his protests, though, something held Eddie back from trying _too_ hard to dissuade Joker, and Joker could probably tell. It had at least a little to do with never really knowing how far he could push Joker before he snapped, which was always a concern despite their relatively benign working relationship, but that wasn't really the beating heart of it. Something in the void of his memory told him he needed the Joker with him, some distant voice he didn't know how to recognize. Maybe the best way to kill a murder clown was with a murder clown?

Eddie didn't know. 

Apparently whatever he'd tried before hadn't stuck, which was unusual for him. 

The closer they got to Derry, the tighter and quieter Joker became in the seat next to him. Edward thought maybe he'd fallen asleep, but a cursory glance revealed the same distant expression he'd been wearing since they stole the car in the first place, since Edward had told Joker where he was going. Where _they_ were going, apparently. If he didn't know the Joker better, he could have sworn Joker was feeling the same apprehension as Eddie was, but even Edward couldn't really guess what was going on in there. 

Though he knew perfectly well he should have been watching the road, Eddie couldn't help himself stealing glances of the Joker when they finally passed the sign welcoming them to Derry. The lost truths he'd been stretching for crashed into him with such a sudden force that he found himself caught, unable to look away, until the road ahead curved without him and a few more things hit in quick sequence: the front of the car and a tree, and his head and the steering wheel.

Everything went black.

* * *

The first thing he saw when consciousness began to filter back in was an unnatural white face hovering above him, and like any reasonable person who had just remembered he was nearly murdered by a monster clown as a child, Eddie punched it. 

" _Fuck_ , Eddie," the Joker said as he stumbled back and fell on his ass. Eddie froze, the cringing realization of just who he'd just hit quickly giving way to a much, much more grave realization, the one that had crashed his car in the first place. Sitting on the side of the road next to him, he could see a similar realization run its course through his passenger. 

"Oh fuck," the Joker said again, and it wasn't the Joker at all. " _Eddie_." It was the first time he'd heard that voice in almost 30 years, the one that wasn't a 'voice' at all. 

"'Oh fuck' is right," Eddie agreed, slowly pushing himself to his feet and extending a hand. "Richie." He'd seen the Joker's face go through more expressions than most people, but he'd never seen it like this, frozen in existential shock. The bizarre coloring had never looked so wrong on him as it did now, without a trace of smile on his white, white face. Like he was moving through molasses, he reached up slowly to grasp at Eddie's hand, but made no move to pull himself to his feet. 

"Come on, asshole, let's get to that meeting. I can't lift your giant ass alone." That, at least, seemed to shake him out of his trance, and he pulled himself up to his full height, still staring at Eddie like _he_ was the one dressed as a clown on the side of the road in broad daylight. 

"I don't know if I should make that meeting after all, Eds." Richie swallowed hard, his throat clicking. He released Eddie's hand to gesture at his face, looking plainly wrong pulled into a grimace. "I know it's Derry, but some restaurants have this weird hangup about mass murderers." 

"One, don't call me that, and two, dye," Eddie said, and a burst of laughter escaped Richie, apparently without his permission.

"Excuse me?" Richie asked, but Eddie was already waving at the rest of him.

"Dye, makeup, hipster glasses… Five minutes in Walmart and you're good. We're early anyway." 

In the end, they had to double back to the next town over, so it was a good thing the car wasn't too badly damaged to run. Since it turned out nobody gave a shit what you did in a Walmart bathroom, they fortunately didn't have to figure out where to go to get the dyeing and makeup done. Richie's back cracked audibly when he straightened up from drying his hair under the hand dryers, and there were a few close calls with bored-looking staff members, but Richie came out of it looking… Well, he might pass for normal in dim lighting.

"Let's hope it doesn't rain," he muttered, staring critically at the end result in the mirror. "I can never get dye to stick to my hair anymore." 

"That green shit isn't dye?" Richie's eyes met Eddie's in the mirror, and Eddie had no idea what to make of his expression. 

"No," Richie said finally, and they left it at that. 

* * *

The ride to the restaurant was oddly silent. Richie seemed boneless but lost in the passenger seat, slumped low enough his knees were pressing into his chest. After their previous scare, Eddie didn't trust himself to look directly at Richie, but his presence filled the car, much as the Joker's always did, no matter how small he made himself. 

Finally, Eddie pulled up to the restaurant and turned the engine off. 

Neither of them made a move to stand, staring up at the neon sign. 

"This is really weird, huh," Eddie observed, then nearly jumped out of his skin as Richie exploded into peals of laughter beside him. 

" _This_ is weird, Eddie Spaghetti? _This_ ? We've spent most of the last _ten years_ getting the shit kicked out of us by a man dressed by a bat, but _this_ is weird? We killed a demon clown together when we were kids, but oooh, _dinner_ , that's the weird part…" Richie trailed off into giggles, his grin looking painful on his painted face. 

"I said what I said," Eddie insisted. "And don't call me that. And don't touch your face!" He added as Richie raised his hands to press them over his eyes, turning the gesture into a double bird. 

"What am I supposed to call you then, huh? _Scarecrow_?" 

"Jesus Christ," Eddie groaned, dragging his hands down his face at least partially to taunt Richie because he couldn't. "This is so _fucking_ weird."

"No, Eds, fucking weird is what I did with your mom, this is just _dinner_ ," Richie insisted, his voice cracking into just a hint of the Joker, and Eddie was struck by the realization that Richie was trying to psych himself up. 

"It's just the Losers, Rich." Halfway through the gesture, he rethought reaching out to put a hand on Richie's knee, and ended up patting his shoulder instead. "We're all fucking weirdos. We can't be the only ones who ended up…" Eddie found himself trailing off, groping for a good summary. 

"Breaking out of an asylum? Trying to kill Batman on a weekly basis? Racking up kill counts in the hundreds? Or did you mean the occasional fucking, Eds? Because looking back on it, that might also come as a surprise to our childhood friends." 

Oh.

Right.

Eddie thought about it.

"It's conceivable that part might not be a shock," he allowed. A strained giggle escaped Richie.

"That used to be my worst fear, you know that? Someone finding out. Well, that and clowns. And now look at me!" Richie stretched out his legs as far as he could, indicating the long length of his body with a gesture. I'm a clown, and we fuck once a quarter! Incredible." Eddie did look at him, unable to completely keep himself from smiling. He kind of got it. It was weird to have their 27-year-old memories suddenly return, reeking of the full range of their teenage feelings. Eddie hadn't felt fear like that since his residency, but he definitely remembered what it had felt like now. And who knew what the Joker felt. Nobody ever let Eddie look at his brain scans. 

"So you agree that it's going to be weird?" He asked at length, grinning, and Richie threw himself out of the car with a groan. 

* * *

Dinner was… Weird, to begin with. Bev was gorgeous, to nobody's surprise, but so was Ben, and actually Mike and Bill weren't doing too bad either. It was only the empty seventh chair that kept a sense of unease in the air throughout the meal. Mike kept trying to check his phone without anyone noticing, but every time his face would come back up pinched into dismay, and eventually he gave up altogether. Conscious of something missing, without really knowing what it was, they found themselves trapped in the usual adult conversational circles probably typical to social groups who were not Gotham criminals. Eddie and Richie kept quiet, with the exception of Richie's periodic giggle fits, until Eddie made an offhanded and very vague reference to something he and Richie had gotten up to around when they'd met again a decade ago, and the conversation ground to a halt. 

"So wait, Eddie and you still knew each other? How is that possible?" Mike stared at them, eyes wide. 

"Wouldn't you know it, we ended up working together!" Richie giggled, dodging the elbow Eddie jerked toward his side. Across the table, Bev's eyebrows were slowly inching downward as she glanced between them. There was something familiar about her eyes, a memory more recent than Derry, and Eddie couldn't place it any more than she could, but he knew it couldn't be good. 

"Really? I can't think of a single job you'd both want. What do you do?" Eddie became abruptly aware that Mike had stopped looking between them and had settled on staring at Richie, his wide-open gaze slowly inching from wonder into horror. Suddenly Eddie remembered where Mike had gotten ahold of him. 

"Mergers and acquisitions!" Richie answered before Eddie could think of a plausible lie, and Eddie wanted to crack his skull open on the table, even as he found himself grinning against his will. 

"Yeah, I'm acquisitions, this guy is a beast at mergers," Eddie said, settling for slapping Richie's shoulder. 

"Oh, fuck me," Mike said out of nowhere, soft and scared, and both of them froze, Eddie staring at Richie. 

"Don't worry," he said slowly, tightening his grip on Richie's shoulder until it had to verge on the uncomfortable. "We're not here for work, right? We're not going to do any work here. We're just gonna kill this thing like we said we would." Eddie had no idea how to read the expression that sat uneasy on Richie's spackled face, until slowly, it split into a grin, at maybe 60% capacity. Still human-looking. 

"You know what, Spaghetti, I almost managed to forget about work entirely until Bev here brought it up. Isn't that _wild_?" This last Richie turned to direct right at Beverly, who was still staring at him like he was a safe she was trying to crack. "And how is life on the catwalk these days, Bev?" 

"Holy shit," said Ben, loud and unexpected enough that it knocked the three of them out of their Mexican standoff. When they turned to look at him instead, it was like the sudden attention withered him, rounding his shoulders and hunching his back. Eddie frowned. 

"I didn't realize so many of us ended up in the same industry," Ben said much more quietly.

"W-w-what the fuck are you talking about, I th-th-thought you w-were an architect," Bill pointed out, visibly bewildered, and to nobody's surprise Richie cackled. Eddie, still frowning, would also have liked to know what Richie and Ben were talking about. He was used to not knowing what the Joker was talking about, but this was Richie, and furthermore this was _Ben_ , and they had no business having inside jokes from _him._

The conversation had clearly moved on, but across the table, Bev was still holding Eddie's attention, her eyebrows raised and expectant. Well, he wasn't about to tell her she'd got one over on him, so Eddie stared back until Bev's face finally cracked into a grin. 

"You know what, I think I remember seeing Eddie too, back when I lived in Gotham year-round. It was at the premiere of 'Scaredy-Cat,' back in, I want to say, 2012? We bumped into each other, right? Had a little argument?" Eddie blinked, feeling his frown slide into astonishment. He _had_ been at that premiere, and he _had_ gotten into a fight, but he'd been there to rob it, and apparently he wasn't the only one who got that idea, because that was the first time he'd really run afoul of _fucking Catwoman._

"Holy shit," Eddie said, and Richie brought the entire goddamn conversation to a halt by throwing his hands up and crowing in victory. 

"There he is!" Richie yelled, resisting Eddie's attempts to shove him off his chair. 

"Fuck off, asshole," Eddie snapped at him, as the situation threatened to devolve into a slap fight. "I just had an entire childhood worth of memories dumped on me, it's not my fault I missed some connections." It was strange to be getting everything back now, at full strength and in full color, especially in contrast to the relative blurry calm of his memories after the procedure. Now that he knew _why_ his childhood had been lost to him, and now that he had it back, Eddie couldn't decide if he regretted the surgery or not. 

"If I can remember Bev, you can too," Richie told him smugly, and Eddie was just considering explaining to Richie exactly how wrong he was and why when Richie let out a yelp and leapt to his feet, dumping his beer partly on the floor, but mostly on Eddie's lap. 

There was a very long moment of silence, where Eddie's childhood friends spent a little longer staring at his crotch than he was comfortable with.

"What the fuck, Richie?" He asked, moderately annoyed but mostly concerned, as the rest of their friends swung into motion to pass him their unused napkins and track down some more. Nobody ever did anything for _no_ reason, but the Joker came as close as anybody to it. When he glanced up from his damp khakis, he found Richie still standing over him, staring at the glass in his hand with something like worry. "Richie?" He asked again, not sure if he should reach out or not. This wasn't like Joker either. 

"I just had the weirdest feeling," he said slowly, setting the glass down. "It was like when your arm falls asleep, but all over, and then I think I blacked out. When I woke up, Spaghedward here had pissed himself, so I know I missed something great." Richie met his eyes eventually, and Eddie realized two things: he should have had a comeback for that, and their friends were all staring at them.

"You dumped your beer on me, dickweed," Eddie told him, and Richie shook his head minutely, like he really hadn't known what he'd done. Without looking, Richie sat heavily, and passed his napkin over as well.

"Didn't want you getting too hot and bothered thinking about Bev," he tried out, and their friends gave it the half-hearted chuckle the joke deserved. 

"Has that happened before?" Mike asked, looking significantly at Eddie. Eddie and Richie both shrugged in tandem. No, he didn't remember It possessing people so overtly and pointlessly, and no, he didn't remember Joker blacking out like that before, but it wasn't like they'd been joined at the hip all those years. He'd gotten up to all sorts of shit Eddie was glad to have had no part in. 

Mood (and pants) dampened, Eddie reached into the center of the table and extracted a fortune cookie. He snapped the cookie neatly in half and extracted the slip of paper, depositing the uneaten halves on Richie's plate so he could unroll the message.

' **IT**.'

"What the fuck?" Eddie muttered under his breath, disconcerted. At Ben's curious noise, he handed the message over, watched Ben fumble it in shock. Around the table, he heard the Losers begin clamoring in agitation, and assumed they all had the same one, but the paper Richie leaned over to stick in his face read ' **GUESS** ,' and the one Ben had picked read ' **CUT**.' One by one, the Losers placed their fortunes in the center of the table and began to argue over what it meant. All but Eddie, watching the fear wash over his friends, and Beverly, who sat glued in her seat with horror, her eyes locked on the paper in her hand. Slowly, trying not to startle her with any sudden movements, Eddie pushed back his chair and rounded the table until he could read over her shoulder. 

" _Fuck_ ," slipped out of his mouth before he could stop it, tense and angry. The argument halted, all eyes on Bev, and with great trepidation she pushed forward the last word: ' **STANLEY**.'

Then shit got really weird for a few minutes, and the Losers Club made sure they would never be welcome back at the Jade again.

* * *

Out in the parking lot, Richie pulled Eddie to the side, staring wildly over his shoulder. The best Eddie could do was hold onto his wrists and get dragged along for the ride, listening with half an ear to the rest of the Losers continue their hushed argument. 

" _That kid recognized me_!" Richie hissed, and Eddie blinked. 

"In the Batman shirt? Lots of kids have Batman shirts. I don't think he recognized _me_ . Or Bev, and what the _fuck_ , Bev is–" Richie shook him by the shoulders roughly, and Eddie compromised by stomping on Richie's foot and ducking out of his grip.

"Get ahold of yourself, Rich, he just heard six grown-ass adults pitch a screaming fit and break all kinds of shit, of course he's gonna stare at us." Richie stuck a black-nailed pointer finger in Eddie's face, and Eddie slapped that away too. 

"Fine, but don't blame me if this brings _Him_ down on our heads, Teddy Bear," Richie snapped. 

"Maybe he can kill It for us, then. Or It can kill him. Either way, a win for us, don't you think?" Eddie remembered way, way too late what Mike had told him, about not telling the others, and what he indeed had not yet told Richie, who stared back at Eddie like he'd been slapped. Again. Harder. 

"It's dead, Eddie," Richie whispered, half pleading, and Eddie was saved by the clatter of Beverly dropping her phone.

" _Mike Hanlon, you better tell everyone what's going on_ right now _, or I will,_ " hissed a very un-Beverly voice from Bev's mouth, currently twisted into an equally un-Beverly look of irritation. 

"W-w-what the fuck," Bill murmured, but Eddie was already looking back at Richie who, shockingly, looked like he was about to cry. 

"Stan?" Richie croaked, and Bev's head whipped around so fast her ginger curls spun out in a halo. Richie took a stumbling half-step toward her, coming to an abrupt stop as Bev began to hastily back away from him. 

" _There are a_ lot _of things we need to talk about, actually_ ," Stanley Uris said with Beverly Marsh's mouth. " _I'll follow you back to the hotel, Mike can fill you in. Someone tell Bev what happened. Oh, and Eddie…_ " Bev's face grimaced. " _Sorry about your pants._ " Just like that, the expression vanished from Bev like it was never there, and she blinked back at her friends all staring wide-eyed at her. 

"I think I just remembered something, you guys," she said, her voice her own again, and then: "hey, when did I break my phone?"

* * *

So Mike gathered them all at the only hotel in town, and in the curiously empty lobby, he explained to them what had happened, and reminded them what they had promised to do. 

In the ensuing horrified silence, as he waited for his friends to catch up, Eddie noticed Mike squinting at a spot next to Bill, across the circle of chairs from Richie.

"Can you see him?" Eddie asked curiously, without really meaning to. Mike, to his credit, didn't bother asking for clarification. He just nodded. 

"I think so. He's just a shadow, but he's getting clearer the longer I look at him."

"Who?" Ben asked, and Mike broke eye contact to stare at the coffee table instead. 

"It's Stan," Beverly said, as gently as she could, laying a hand over Ben's knee. "That's what I remembered, from 27 years ago. From when I was caught in the Deadlights." As Bev turned to look over her other shoulder, behind Bill, Ben's hand slipped over hers and squeezed. "I saw how Stan died," she murmured. "I saw how we all die." 

Beside him, Eddie heard Richie take in a ragged breath.

"Fuck you," Richie muttered, voice tight with control. "Stan isn't fucking dead."

" _Actually_ ," Bill said with someone else's voice, firm but apologetic, " _she's right. I am dead._ "

"I saw you in the tub," Bev began tearfully, but Richie'd had enough. He threw himself off of the chair and across the room, toward the equally abandoned but well stocked bar. Eddie followed close on his heels, gesturing behind for Bev and Stan to keep going. He was pretty sure he had the gist. 

Behind the bar, Richie rummaged noisily through the bottles until he found the one he wanted, popped the cap, and took a couple of slow pulls that stretched out the length of his long, long neck. Eddie stared a few more seconds than would have been appropriate for most people, but when Richie tilted his head back far enough that Eddie could see a flash of white from under his collar, Eddie reached out and tilted the bottle right side up again. Oddly considerate, for him, Richie held the bottle out to Eddie, who eyed the spit-slick neck with distaste. 

"Alcohol is a disinfectant," Richie started, an argument so old they could have it in their sleep, and Eddie grimaced so he wouldn't be tempted to grin. Instead of picking up his own part of the bit, Eddie rested his elbows on the bar and leaned across it, into Richie's space, something he would never admit he had to go on tiptoe to do. 

"I have to say," Eddie whispered, quiet enough Richie had to lean in to hear, "Stan's was pretty much the sanest reaction of any of us." Richie stared blankly back at him, his eyes huge and green in the dim light, and for a second Eddie thought Richie was going to hit him. 

Instead, he threw back his head and laughed, sharp and wild. The back of Eddie's neck prickled with their friends' silent stares. His laughter dwindling into chuckles, Richie leaned over the bar and dropped a wet, smacking kiss onto Eddie's forehead. 

"Oh Eddie Bear, you always know exactly what to say to make me laugh." Pretty much anything, when he was in a good mood, which had its pros and cons. In a bad mood, though, it had to be something no reasonable person would laugh at. Yeah, Edward supposed he did still know how to make Richie laugh. Still clutching the bottle of whiskey to his chest, Richie rounded the bar and slouched back to his seat. 

With a gesture just this side of melodrama from dignity, Richie set the bottle down in the middle of the coffee table and twirled his fingers at the Losers. "Is there… A _spirit_ in this circle?" There were a few seconds where Eddie thought the joke might have been a little much, but Ben shuddered unprovoked, then leaned across the space Eddie had been sitting in to sock Richie as hard as he could in the shoulder. 

" _Asshole_ ," Stanley said fondly, with Ben's mouth, as Richie shook out his numb arm, and the rest of them snickered unsympathetically. " _I was telling everyone, I'm not going anywhere until after It's dead. I made a call, and it seemed like the right one at the time, but… Well, I'm here now, and I don't think I can leave._ " 

"Ben, Bill and I have agreed to let Stan talk through us when he needs to," Mike explained. "Hopefully that'll be enough. I've been doing a lot of spirit work lately, and I think I'll be able to see him with a little practice." 

"You're into b-black magic now, Mike?" Bill asked, frowning, and Eddie turned to stare Richie down before he could say anything at all aloud. 

"What do you mean, 'black magic?'" Mike echoed, mock-affronted, and Richie let a snicker bubble out.

"I think n-necromancy counts no matter who does it," Bill countered blandly, not rising to the bait. A wave of quiet laughter washed over the group. 

Onerous circumstances or no, there was apparently nothing quite like catching up with old friends. Sure, it was weird that one of them kept slipping between bodies at apparent random, but still, it was nice. The tension from the restaurant, the imbalance caused by their missing member, was eased, despite the Losers now knowing why Stan hadn't made it to the Jade of the Orient. 

Eventually, time and their ages caught up to them, and they peeled apart. Mike, Bill and apparently Stan left for Mike's place, while Ben and Bev split off into their separate rooms (to Ben's reluctance, visible to everyone but, apparently, Bev). That left Eddie, Richie, and the nearly empty bottle of whiskey. Richie's arm had ended up slung over the back of the loveseat behind Eddie, though when was anybody's guess. If any of the other Losers had given them a second look, Eddie hadn't noticed. Richie may have eventually worn him down regarding the whiskey. Pleasantly buzzed, he found himself leaning into Richie's side, and Richie didn't move away. He smelled like a lot of things, like disinfectant and gunsmoke, like Chinese food and sweat and whiskey and beer. Eddie didn't hate it. 

"I booked a single," Eddie muttered into Richie's armpit, and felt more than saw Richie's shrug. 

The next thing he was aware of, Eddie was curled on his side in bed, stripped to boxers, a pair of spindly white arms locked tight around his waist. For a second he froze, the sense-memory of panic catching up to him, before the scent caught up to him as well, the hint of voice in the quiet breaths at the base of his neck.

"You better have taken off your makeup before getting into bed," he mumbled, half asleep, and Richie snorted into his hair. 

"Shh, Teddy, you sound just like your mom but I can't get it up right now. Save it for tomorrow." Eddie threw an elbow blindly backward and was rewarded with a chuckle and a tightened embrace. It didn't feel like Richie was smearing makeup onto the back of his neck, but if he woke up to a Richie-faceprint on his head, Eddie was going to be pissed. 

"Love you, fuckface," Eddie sighed, and was asleep before his brain could catch up to his mouth.

* * *

Eddie was generally a light sleeper, but Eddie also didn't drink much. The first rays of sunlight into the room somehow stabbed directly through Eddie's eyelids and into his brain, startling him into consciousness with an irritated groan. 

It took him a long time to get his bearings again, the expanse of bed, tangled covers and wood paneling a departure from the cell he'd eventually come to think of as a home away from home. Sort of. Only with restraints and torture. Aside from the whole being in Derry, something else felt off about the situation, but it wasn't until Eddie rolled over onto his back that he realized the room felt closer and colder because he had woken up alone. 

On further inspection, the bathroom was a mess of makeup and dye, and the Walmart bags had all been brought up from the car and rifled through, so it seemed like the Joker was loose somewhere in Derry. It wouldn't be the worst thing that had ever happened to Derry. 

What Eddie found when he went downstairs to the lobby, was that the Joker had not in fact gone very far in Derry. Richie, Bill and Mike all sat around the coffee table, talking lowly over a vase or trash can or something in the middle. When Eddie hit the bottom step, Richie glanced over his shoulder and ostentatiously scooted over to one side of the loveseat, patting the cushion next to him.

" _Hi Eddie_ ," Bill's mouth said with Stan's voice, and Eddie shook his head as he slid back into the spot he'd passed out in last night.

"That's still incredibly weird, Stan," Eddie informed him. 

"I'm kind of getting used to it," Mike shrugged, "but I can also kind of see him, so…"

"It's weird that you think that makes it less weird," said Eddie, and Bill's shoulders shrugged.

" _How do you think I feel? I was an accountant until Tuesday._ "

"Shouldn't have fucking killed yourself, then," Richie snapped. Frowning, Eddie leaned into his side, but Richie didn't move one way or the other, his body a long tense line. Bill's eyes stared at the side of Richie's head, his expression inscrutable with the wrong person at the wheel, but Richie kept his eyes on the coffee table. 

" _Yeah, Rich. Probably not, but I can't really walk this one back, so I guess this is what you guys get._ " Bill slumped a little in his chair, the muscles of his face falling back into their time-worn grooves. It was a little like some of the videos of more severe DID patients Eddie had watched in school. Across the table, Mike sighed as his eyes tracked someone only he could see up the stairs. 

"Nice, Richie. Beep f-f-fucking beep," Bill said, then flinched in surprise as Richie smacked a palm into the table. 

"Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke!"

"Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?" Mike, who should have known better, asked.

"The punchline is," Richie leaned in close so the sunlight really highlighted how much makeup he was wearing, "nobody fucking knows."

"That's the $64,000 question," Eddie agreed, deliberately calm, wrapping a hand tightly around Richie's wrist. "Almost literally. There's a psychiatric journal that hosts an annual contest with a cash prize every April. Whoever submits the most plausible case study and diagnosis."

"Eddie Bear won the first five years, but–" Richie lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper "– _he cheats_."

"I do cheat," Eddie agreed. He held Mike's gaze until Mike nodded minutely and leaned back in his chair. Bill, on the other hand, had been looking between them like he was watching a tennis match.

"W-w-was that a bit?" Mike looked at Richie, who looked at Eddie, who shrugged. Apparently Bill did not subscribe to the American Journal of Psychiatry, or pay much attention to the news coming out of Gotham. 

"Yes?" Richie guessed.

"Well, it could use some work," Bill said flatly, and Eddie had to cough to cover a sudden-onset laughing fit. 

Ben, Bev and presumably the ghost of Stan filtered down eventually, and Mike explained the weird thing in the middle of the table, and what he expected them to do with it. 

"You want us to split up?" Eddie asked dubiously. He looked sidelong at Richie, who glared back mutinously. 

"I don't need a minder, Eds. Quit trying to seduce me with your motherly ways, you just don't have the hips to pull it off." Bev also looked doubtful, but declined to back him up, so Eddie threw his hands up in defeat. 

"Fine, it's not like we're going to be coming back here for Thanksgiving. Just try to fly under the radar for once in your life." The town hadn't noticed one clown on a murder spree for a hundred years, what were the odds it would notice a second one? Eddie stood up and patted himself down for the car keys. 

"Not my mom, Eddie," Richie sing-songed as Eddie made for the door.

"I dunno, Richie, you are what you eat," Eddie shot back, letting it slam shut before Richie could get a clapback in. He'd pay for that later, but probably not in any way he couldn't live with. 

* * *

Eddie's original plan had been to drive around aimlessly until something jumped out at him as useful, but three blocks into Main Street he found himself pulling into a parking space already. The facade of the drugstore hadn't changed much in the last 30 years, and probably hadn't changed much for 30 years before that. Eddie wouldn't be surprised if the same people were still trapped there in the same jobs. 

Drumming his hands on the wheel, Eddie considered his plan of attack. He hadn't needed an inhaler since, well, shortly after medical school. That had gone a long way toward proving what he should have known all along, that his mother and the doctors had been full of shit. It was probably one of the few occasions he would have been better off listening to Richie, who'd repeatedly told him more or less the same thing. Regardless, he needed one now, if not for actual medical use. Fortunately for Mike's timeline, Eddie always made sure to grab a prescription pad on his way out of Arkham. 

Everything at the pharmacy actually went great, all things considered, up until the zombie leper Eddie had been choking out with a surprising degree of success decided to make his getaway by puking both inside Eddie's mouth and all over his face, an experience that was really rounded out fully when Eddie finally emerged from the basement to find that his rightfully stolen car wasn't where he left it. 

" _Fucking clowns_ ," Eddie growled under his breath, and started back to the hotel on foot. 

* * *

The walk back to the hotel seemed longer than it had any right to be. If Eddie had to pick one thing about Derry to be grateful for, it was people's propensity for ignoring all the bizarre shit going on, so at least he didn't have to deal with any undue questions; Derry was a lot like Gotham in that way, and pretty much in that way only. The walk, similarly, only had that one thing going for it. Whatever It had puked up on him didn't dry so much as get stickier and stickier with time, and Eddie could feel it creeping under every single item of clothing he was wearing. Shit, he could feel it in his socks. It might have been the most objectively disgusting thing that had ever happened to him, and that wasn't even taking the taste into consideration. Eddie ended up having to stop every block or so to dry heave, and on a few occasions, less-dry heave. 

By the time he got back, whatever patience reserves Eddie had previously were severely in the negatives, and the sight of the distinctively smashed-in stolen car parked back at the hotel definitely didn't help. Ben and Bev were having some kind of chat in the lobby, but they stopped cold at the sight of Eddie, drenched in vomit and visibly fuming, and silently parted to let him through to the stairs. 

When Eddie slammed through the hotel room door, Richie yelped and scrambled to the other side of the bed. Whatever Eddie had been about to say died before it could make its way out of his mouth, and instead he stood dumbly in the open doorway and stared at Richie. 

"Why are you naked?" Was all he could think of, and in any other mood he might have cracked up. Richie hadn't taken his makeup off again, but he had taken his clothes off, and the extreme farmer's tan look of made-up hands and face against the paste-white rest of him might have been the stupidest thing he'd ever seen. 

"Why are you _sticky_?" Richie countered, equally bewildered. 

"It fucking threw up on me, dickweed. Your turn." 

"Maybe I was hoping to fuck you before we march off to our deaths. Could you close the door now?" A sensible suggestion, for a change. Eddie did so. 

"Yeah, that's not gonna be on the table right now," Eddie said, beelining through the room toward the bathroom.

"So, like, five minutes?" Richie called after him. 

"I will literally puke on your nasty clown dick, Richie, don't test me." Hoping to drown out any possible response from Richie, Eddie yanked back the shower curtain and came face-to-face with his other, _other_ greatest childhood fear. 

One major side effect of the procedure, and honestly the one that probably interfered with his life the most, was the lack of fight-or-flight response. There were some situations where a reflexive fear response was helpful, even lifesaving, and all Eddie could think, watching Henry Bowers's knife arc down at him through the air, was that maybe this was a situation where he could have used a fear response. Instead, it was the pain that managed to finally shock him into motion, stumbling backward with the knife lodged in his face. Bowers stepped out of the tub and stalked toward him with a grin that, to be honest, came off as kind of a cheap Joker knockoff after Eddie's long exposure to the real thing. 

Speaking of. 

Eddie must have managed to make some kind of noise after all, because the second he stepped past the half-open door, a white streak blew through, howling rage, and tackled Bowers back into the tub. On his way down, Bowers snagged the curtain and it began to snap, one ring at a time, in a slow collapse on top of the furious struggle beneath. Eddie thought he ought to help, probably, but as he began to move, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. 

He'd had his share of bad days before, but this… Hair flattened to his head and stolen polo soaked through with something else's vomit, knife sticking straight out of his face like some kind of comedy prop… It might have been funny, if it hadn't been so disgusting, not to mention painful. Eddie was sincerely touched that Richie hadn't paused to laugh at him on the way to murdering Bowers. 

Oh, right. 

Eddie yanked the curtain back from Bowers a second time. Richie had gotten him pinned pretty good, hands around his neck and knees crushing Bowers's hands into the sides of the tub. Bowers mostly looked confused, which was a reasonable reaction to a naked Joker barrelling out of nowhere to choke you to death. 

"Hey babe." Richie's voice was a low growl, tight with exertion. "You wanna get in here? This is harder than usual." Yeah, that did seem a little odd. Richie had strong hands, and generally when he was trying to strangle someone, they got strangled and stayed that way. Bowers was still thrashing around in the tub, legs kicking wildly. Eventually one of those knees was probably going to make contact with Richie's junk, which would be kind of a pity. 

Gingerly, Eddie grasped the handle of the knife and pulled it out of his face.

"Title of your sex tape," he smirked, regretting it as the movement tugged on the wound. Eddie knelt down by the side of the tub and braced his other hand on Bowers's forehead to hold him still, then slowly and carefully pressed the knife into Bowers's eye socket until he felt it crunch through bone. Bowers abruptly went limp. Like a true professional, Richie didn't let go until Bowers had been still for more than a minute, flexing his hands with a grimace as he sat back on his heels. 

"Well that was cathartic," Richie said, then broke into a broad grin without warning. "Title of _our_ sex tape." Eddie started to laugh despite himself and immediately regretted it as the new hole in his face sang with pain. 

"Holy shit," Bev said, standing in the bathroom doorway and not quite hiding a whip behind her back. "Did you _stab_ him, Richie?" She seemed more surprised than anything, which Eddie was a little offended by. 

"No!" Richie sounded _very_ offended. "Bowers did!" Bev's eyebrows shot toward her hairline.

"Bowers is dead," she started warily. Richie yanked the knife out with a nasty sucking noise and slid it across the tile toward Bev, where it skittered to a stop against her shoe. 

"He sure the fuck is now," Richie agreed. Sidestepping the knife, Bev inched forward, then stopped cold. 

"Why are you _naked_?" Bev retreated back to the doorway again, like she was doing a slow-motion gross-out tango. "Is this a sex thing?" 

"Well it was, Bevvy, but you're really killing the mood," Richie said with a grin, and Eddie pushed himself to his feet.

"I'm using your shower," he announced to Bev, scooting past her as best he could without touching her. "If I have to spend another minute with leper puke _and_ an open wound, I'm going to lose my mind."

" _Leper puke_?" He heard Bev ask, and decided to leave that one for later. 

When he eventually got out of Bev's shower and dressed himself in relatively clean Walmart clothes, Eddie emerged from Bev's bathroom to find her sitting on her bed, surrounded by towels and, to his surprise, needles and surgical thread. She patted a spot next to her and Eddie sat obediently. It probably said something about him that he found the smell of rubbing alcohol as comforting as he did, but his back finally unknit as Bev ripped open an alcohol pad and leaned toward him. 

"Thanks," he tried to say without using any facial muscles, and Bev tutted at him. 

"Don't talk until I'm done, I don't have a lot of experience doing this for other people." That was one way to shut Eddie up. They sat in comfortable silence as Bev worked on his face, and eventually even the pinch and drag of the needle and thread through his face fell into a kind of rhythm he could relax into. 

"Ben and I both owe Mike twenty bucks because of you two." Eddie made a questioning noise without moving any of his face. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Bev smiling at him. "Ben didn't believe Richie is the Joker, and I didn't believe you two are an item, but Mike bet us both that we were both right, so. Twenty bucks." Eddie made a disgruntled noise, but had to wait for Bev to tie off the suture and snip the thread before he could respond.

"'An item' might be overstating it. We're not even really partners in crime." Or they hadn't often been, at any rate, but Eddie suspected things might change if they got out of Derry alive. Assuming they remembered each other. The thought that they might not was unexpectedly unpleasant. 

"You put up with him more than anyone else does." Bev ducked her head to rethread her needle as Eddie shrugged.

"What else is new?" 

* * *

The other Losers managed to collect their items without getting killed _or_ puked on, lucky them. By the time Mike came back to the hotel to check on them, Eddie had already had to explain the bandage on his face to Stan, in Bill's body, and then Bill, sans Stan, but at least they were all gathered together. Henry Bowers's body had mysteriously vanished in the time it had taken to shower, though the shower curtain sticking out of the dumpster in the parking lot led Eddie to believe it probably wasn't a supernatural vanishing. 

Once he'd confirmed everybody had their thing, Mike gave them a five minute ETD and sat down at the bar with his duffel bag. Eddie and Richie headed back up to the room to, Eddie naively assumed, collect the Arkham guards' guns that they'd stashed under the mattress. The second the door closed behind them though, Richie had Eddie backed against it, licking hungrily into his mouth. For a second, Eddie considered letting himself get lost in it, Richie's long fingers crawling up his sides under his polo and Richie's long thigh wedged between Eddie's and pressing hard, but only for a second. He opened his mouth too wide, the stitches in his cheek dug in, and Eddie pulled back so fast his head cracked into the door and he saw stars. 

"Motherfucker!" Eddie hissed. Richie hummed agreeably, nosing under his jaw, and that was nice, but Eddie's face was killing him, and today was just not the fucking day. He shoved Richie off of him, hard, and Richie stumbled back a step. To Eddie's surprise, Richie looked genuinely hurt, his too-red lips pressed into a line. 

"Not the time," Eddie snapped, tugging his shirt back down. 

" _When?_ " Richie snapped back, and Eddie threw his hands wide.

"I don't _know_ , Richie. When we're done with It, unless I get stabbed again, in which case I reserve the right to move the timeline forward again, but definitely _not fucking now_." Eddie pushed past Richie to kneel by the mattress, shoving an arm under to fish around for the guns they'd stashed. 

"Do I gross you out now?"

"What do your mean, 'now?'" Eddie answered without thinking, setting the shotgun he'd extracted on the floor next to him and reaching in for the handguns before the tone of Richie's question caught up to him. When he looked up, Richie was giving him that same hangdog look, and there was almost nothing of the Joker in him at all. Wordlessly, Eddie hooked a finger into Richie's belt loop and tugged until Richie knelt beside him. 

"You're gross as hell, Trashmouth," Eddie murmured gently, holding eye contact. Slowly, almost shyly, a smile broke over Richie's face. Point hopefully made, Eddie leaned in and kissed him, careful and sweet. 

"Just to confirm," Richie asked as they broke apart, lingering close enough for Eddie to feel the breath in his words, "you're still about this nasty clown dick?"

Eddie shoved him, and Richie sprawled out laughing. 

"I am all about your nasty clown dick. Now help me reach the fucking handguns." 

When the Losers assembled downstairs once more, definitely more than ten minutes later, the only one who showed up unarmed was Bill. 

"W-w-what the hell is this?" He gestured expansively at the semicircle of his friends. Eddie had ended up with the shotgun and Bowers's knife, while Richie had taken both handguns. Beverly, however, came downstairs with a cat o'nine tails wrapped around her torso like a bandolier and elbow-length black leather gloves with claws, which was probably a surprise to Bill, who lived in fucking Metropolis and apparently sucked at double entendre. The real surprises to Eddie, though, were Ben and Mike, the latter of whom was now wearing rings on nearly every finger, a pendant that was almost definitely bone and, for some reason, an actual turban with a faintly glowing red gem. All Ben had was a pair of what looked like steel brass knuckles with claws. 

"'Same industry,' huh?" Eddie raised his eyebrows, but declined further comment when Ben set his jaw and glared back. 

"W-why are we bringing g-guns to the ritual?" Bill broke in, gesturing unfairly at Richie and Eddie, and completely ignoring Catwoman, Catman, and whatever Mike had going on.

"Because this is America, goddammit," Richie said. 

"Because there might end up being a… Combat element," Mike said at the same time and at about half the confidence. That shut the rest of them up. 

" _Combat element_?" Stan asked through Bill, since it seemed like nobody else was going to, and Mike winced. 

* * *

The Neibolt house sucked exactly as hard as everybody now remembered it, and the sewers were just as nasty, any advantage Eddie might have gained through (yes, seriously) increased height pretty much negated by the stress of trying to make sure nothing came anywhere near his bandaged face. 

As they all gathered around the burning vase and threw their tokens into the fire, Eddie couldn't help but feel like he was part of the setup for some immense cosmic joke, the punchline of which was going to involve getting his head bitten off by a demon (alien?) clown. As they chanted, heads down, Eddie felt Richie's eyes on him with the force of a physical touch. When he gave into the urge to glance away from the light show, he found Richie's expression unexpectedly grim. Trying to think happy thoughts, or at least thoughts about successful evil (demon/alien) clown murder, Eddie squeezed Richie's hand. They were going to be fine, right? They were always fine. 

Shortly after that, things became very definitively not fine. The vase began to swell with red latex, the clown's voice booming in their ears. Eddie's friends panicked and scattered in the face of their childhood fears, and Eddie found himself rooted to his spot in the broken circle, rubbing a rough spot of his shotgun's stock as he tried to decide what to do. 

Then, between one blink of the eye and the next, Eddie found himself at the wall of the crater, crouched under an overhang as the massive spider-clown-thing clutched at its face and yowled. In his tingling hands, the shotgun was still smoking. 

" _What happened to you, Eddie_?" Stan's voice asked close by, more unnerved than concerned. 

"Experimental neurosurgery," Eddie summed up, technically accurately, and watched Bill's face pull into Stan's frown. "I'll explain later?" 

" _Eddie_!!" The sheer panic in Richie's voice drove Eddie back into action, scrambling to one side as It's massive pointy leg slammed down between them. Momentum kept him running until he found himself yanked up against the wall, inches from Richie's terrified face. 

"Still not the time," Eddie said. Richie scowled 

"Less talking, more reloading." Richie shoved the plastic bag of ammo into Eddie's arms and turned around, taking up a stance like shielding Eddie with his body was going to do anything. Well, Eddie considered as he slid the new shells into place, it was kind of a sweet gesture.

It had chosen to follow Bill instead of Eddie in their mad dash across the cavern, but seemed to be regretting that decision as It found itself pelted with what was probably some kind of magical energy. As It twisted back and forth, looking for an easier target, Eddie noted with irritation that there were no wounds where It had been clutching its face. 

"I'm not sure we brought the right tool for the job," he observed, tying off the plastic bag and looping the handles around a wrist. 

"Guess we'll just have to give It our best shot," Richie responded. Eddie rolled his eyes at the back of Richie's head, and then they were darting back into the fray.

The battle felt like it stretched into hours, though it couldn't have been much more than a few minutes since they'd botched the ritual, but Eddie found himself out of shells pretty quickly, and Richie followed not long after. While the chances of It getting to Ben or Bev were pretty low, the spry motherfuckers, it felt like only a matter of time before one of the other Losers got tired enough for It to get in a lucky bite. 

"I'm sorry I dragged you guys back here," Mike gasped out, dropping into a breathless crouch behind Eddie's new favorite boulder. Eddie shrugged, watching Bev's whip wrap around It's face as Ben dropped down onto It's back. There was no way those two hadn't fought together before. 

"It had to be done, Mike. I don't love that it has to be done by us, but it had to be done." 

"How are you so calm?" Eddie sighed and sat back on his haunches. It was rough to tear his eyes away from the battle, but he turned to look Mike in the eye nonetheless, so he could see that Eddie was being serious.

"I bribed a neurosurgery fellow to take out part of my brain after medical school, all right? Now you can tell everyone else." Eddie turned back toward It and the others, shaking his head. "I was just sick of being scared, you know?" 

"Right now?" Mike let out a shaky breath. "I almost envy you." Both of them cringed in tandem as It managed to yank Bev off her feet and fling her into a stalagmite.

"I think It might be invincible," Mike said in a very small voice, soft enough Eddie almost lost it under all the screaming. Eddie gave it a few moments' thought, then shook his head.

"No, I don't think so. I think I almost had It at the pharmacy… It was like It was shrinking in my hands while I was trying to strangle It. Almost cathartic, until It puked in my face." Unfortunately, Eddie didn't have time to sit around and chat with Mike anymore. 

" _Hey dumbfuck, you think you get to call yourself a murder clown?_ " It jerked its head around from where It had managed to throw Ben off its back, and began advancing on where Richie stood out in the open, unarmed and arms wide, the moron. 

" _You're a disgrace to the profession!"_ Richie began backpedaling rapidly, but not rapidly enough to outrun a giant spider monster. Eddie found himself sprinting across the cavern before he knew what he was doing.

" _Nobody knows who the fuck you are, motherf-_ " Richie ran out of road, slamming back into an overhang hard enough to knock the wind out of his lungs, and then Richie was caught. Not injured but worse, shocked into stillness. His mouth went slack, his whole body limp as a dead fish as, horribly, he began to float upward. 

Not fucking today, Eddie thought, heaving himself to the top of the outcropping. Bowers's knife felt too light in his hand, but it was what he had, and Eddie was going to keep Richie out of that gyrating well of teeth if he had to jump in and pull Richie out himself. 

"Not fucking today," Eddie repeated aloud, and flung the knife as hard as he could past Richie's floating body and into the maw of the creature. 

There was a horrible grinding noise, and It clutched at its throat as it stumbled back toward the ring of stalagmites, but Eddie's attention was off It the second Richie's body collapsed to the cavern floor. Eddie followed shortly after, ignoring the twinges in his knees, and dropped down over Richie's prone form. 

For a moment that seemed to stretch into forever, Eddie couldn't think of what to do to erase the horrible blankness from Richie's face, until a tiny, perfect bubble of memory floated up from the nothingness. 

Eddie bent to kiss Richie, and there was a second where he felt a jolt go through him, as though it was the first time instead of the hundredth, and it was like there was nobody else in the world. 

The sound of a too-close whipcrack startled both of them badly. Eddie was pretty sure at least one of them chipped a tooth, but he was up and running before his brain had even come fully back online, Richie stumbling close behind him. When they'd cleared enough distance to stop and look, they saw Bev pulling her cat o'nine tails free from where she'd captured It's knife leg, and running hard in the opposite direction. 

" _Hey._ " Ben's hand clapped down on Eddie's shoulder, Stan's focus an almost tangible force. " _Mike says you have an idea of how to end this_." Eddie thought about it.

"You know what," he said slowly, "I think I do."

* * *

Afterward, the Losers crawled out into the dawn as one, each of them connected to the others through a hand tangled in the hem of a shirt, linked elbows, a shoulder to lean on, to take the weight off a dragging foot. Eddie felt whole, in a way he hadn't in decades, before and after the procedure he'd thought had been the single turning point of his life. 

It was inevitable, of course, that their stumbling path brought them to the quarry that had defined their summer, what felt like a lifetime ago. At any other point, Eddie might have protested, but this morning he watched his friends jump one by one, whooping their joy to be alive all the way down. When it was just the two of them standing at the edge, Eddie felt Richie's fingers wrap around his wrist, and turned to see a genuine smile lighting Richie's face in the awakening sun.

"I love you," Richie said for the first time. It felt like one more word in a sentence they'd been speaking together since they were kids. Eddie freed his wrist and brought up his hand to cup Richie's face, meeting Richie's smile with one of his own.

"I know," Eddie said, and stepped off the edge of the cliff. 

When Eddie surfaced, Richie was already clawing his way up beside him. They chased each other halfheartedly to shallower water, where Eddie found his footing and let himself be caught around the waist, reeled in and held close. 

Shivering, Richie bent and pressed his forehead hard against Eddie's. The cracked hipster glasses had been lost somewhere under Neibolt, and though his makeup had somehow survived most of the sewers and the ensuing fight, here in the quarry it was finally melting away, giving way to unnatural whiteness. The brown was even dripping out of his hair, just like he'd said it would, leaving behind that odd dark green that almost looked black when it was wet. 

"I don't know who to be now," Richie admitted, just for Eddie, the sound barely more than breath against Eddie's lips. "I forgot for so long. I forgot _everything_ . I forgot my _name_."

"Pick one. Or be someone new. I don't give a fuck. If you forget, I'll remind you." Richie kissed him then, or he kissed Richie, barely a press that left red, red lips behind. 

"Oh my g-g-g-g- _god_ ." Bill's stutter snapped through the quarry like the crack of a whip. "Richie, _you're_ the J-J-J–"

"We all have our coping mechanisms, okay?" Eddie interjected, ignoring the snickers Richie was helplessly burying in the collar of his polo. "Some of us raise the dead, some of us steal, some of us kill people, and some of us string people along for 300 pages only to fuck it up in the last five." 

"F-f-fuck you, Eddie," Bill answered on autopilot, then frowned. "W-w-wait, w-which are you?"

"Bill, do you not watch the news? Eddie poisoned Gotham's water and caused a month-long riot last November," Bev answered, more patiently than Eddie.

"That can't be right, Scarecrow is like… Six-four." Eddie jerked out of Richie's grip as he began fucking _howling_ with laughter, _right in Eddie's ear_ , and glowered at Ben. 

"It's called a costume, dumbass. At least I didn't steal my girlfriend's act." Ben had the good grace to look chagrined as Bev's laughter rang out through the quarry.

"'Girlfriend,' huh?" Bev teased gently reaching out to push Ben's hair out of his face. "I think I like that." 

* * *

By unspoken consensus, once the Losers got back to the hotel, they split immediately to begin packing. It was early enough in the day that nobody was around to see them slip inside, or else the Gotham phenomenon of not seeing what you didn't want to held up even after It's demise, but Eddie didn't want to chance running into any issues with Richie. Bill, as the only one of them who was alive, not in any trouble with the law and not planning to go off the grid anytime soon, graciously volunteered to be everyone's point of contact. 

And so, once again, the Losers broke apart, this time secure in the knowledge that they'd hear from each other again. Eddie and Richie were the last to leave the hotel, since Eddie very reasonably insisted on showering (separately, Richie) and re-dressing his face wound. 

They had nearly managed to get all the way out of town when Richie jerked in his laid-back seat and sat bolt upright, looking around wildly. 

"Hold on, did we miss the bridge?" Eddie frowned.

"The old covered bridge, you mean?"

"The Kissing Bridge, yeah. Take us by the Kissing Bridge, I want to show you something." 

"I've seen your dick, Richie," Eddie grumbled, but he took the turn nevertheless. 

As soon as Eddie pulled over on the far side of the bridge, Richie was leaping out the door. A little spitefully, Eddie took his time to double-check the parking brake and round the car to pointedly shut the door Richie had left open, before he meandered over to where Richie was kneeling by the railing. 

"Are you going to carve our initials?" Eddie asked as he knelt down beside Richie, but he needn't have asked. He saw it before Richie could say anything, reached out to feel it under his fingertips, sun-warm wood and the weather-worn, jagged ' _R+E._ ' 

Eddie felt lit from within, breaking out in a smile he could never in a hundred years have tried to contain. 

"I love you, too," he said softly, shuffling closer and leaning into the kiss as Richie wrapped him in his long, white arms. 

Pressure against his palm broke Eddie out of the moment, and he glanced down to see Richie holding Bowers's knife out to him, hilt first. When Richie had managed to pick it up was anybody's guess, but Eddie was glad he'd had it now. Eddie grasped the hilt readily and turned the point on the rotting wood, absently tonguing the inside of the wound the knife had given him. In a few moments, it was done, jagged and reckless beneath the childhood sweethearts _R_ and _E_ , carved without regard to the others who had dared to take up their space: **_J + S = 4EVER._ ** With a final thrust, Eddie jammed the whole blade through the wood to the hilt, and sat back to admire his work. 

"What do you–" Richie's mouth swallowed the rest of Eddie's words, and he gave them up gladly. The kiss started slow and deep, and only grew, and finally they parted gasping, Richie's broad white hands wormed inside Eddie's shirt, Eddie's fingers knotted into the belt loops of Richie's jeans.

"Now?" Richie pleaded against Eddie's mouth, and Eddie found himself nodding without any conscious say in the matter. _Now_ , his pulse sang, his heart beat. _Now, now, now._ Without breaking contact for a second, they stumbled across the road and across the back seat of the car, Richie wedged into the corner between the door and the seat back, Eddie climbing after to straddle his hips and push him back with kiss after deep, demanding kiss. 

Richie's shirt was the first to go, followed by Eddie's, and as Eddie bent to nuzzle into familiar green chest hair, he felt Richie's fingers slide their way under the waistband of Eddie's khakis, felt Richie's palms curve tightly over his ass. 

"Yeah," he murmured into Richie's skin, turning his head to lip at Richie's nipple. "Fuck me, baby." Eddie punctuated the request with a bite, sparking a groan from them both as Richie's grip tightened and his hips bucked mindlessly. Working together, they shucked Eddie out of his clothes in record time, shoving everything into the footwell as a problem for the future. When Richie dug into the pocket of his jeans and came up with a clear plastic bottle, Eddie bit his lip to keep from laughing.

"I'm that much of a sure thing, huh?" He leaned in to whisper in Richie's ear, hands working incongruously to unbuckle his belt, work open his fly. Richie laughed, the sound rumbling pleasantly. 

"Eddie, I've had that on me since Walmart, you are _anything_ but a sure thii _iiiaahhh_ ," Richie trailed off as Eddie freed his cock and gave it a few long, slow strokes to say hello. It had been too long since they'd last been acquainted.

"Open me up for your nasty clown dick, baby." Richie's cock twitched hard in Eddie's hand, and Eddie snickered. "Oh I see, you _like_ that." 

"I like _you_ ," Richie countered, and Eddie didn't really have an argument ready for that. One by one, Richie slid long, slick fingers inside Eddie, bending his back into an arc that he was definitely going to regret later, but couldn't bring himself to resist now, not with Richie's fingers sliding in and out of him, rough and careful, stroking back and forth over his prostate. 

"Please," Eddie gasped, watching in a daze as his cock smeared wetly over the soft skin of Richie's belly. "Please baby, now, please." Eddie shuddered as Richie pulled his fingers out, barely giving him time to swipe a slick hand over his cock before Eddie was sinking down onto it, groaning gratefully. The pace they set up was deep and steady as a heartbeat, chanting _yes, yes, yes_ under their breaths, and gradually they built in speed until Richie was pulling him down to meet every hard thrust, Eddie braced against the roof of the car and the passenger headrest, crying out sharp and loud in pleasure. Richie came first, a rush of heat deep inside, his face pressed helplessly against Eddie's chest, and Eddie chased his own pleasure sharp and fast until he shuddered and spilled too, white and hot against white skin. 

Panting in the sudden quiet, Eddie folded his arms around Richie's shoulders and pressed a kiss to the top of Richie's head. Under his arms he could feel Richie's shoulders shaking, could feel dampness dripping down his chest, could hear quiet sniffles. Silently, Eddie tightened his embrace and let his eyes slide shut.

Just a little while longer, and then they'd be on their way.

Just a little while longer. 

* * *

It had been six months, and to his shock Eddie had kept up with almost all of them. In exchange for a few unremarkable robberies, he was able to get a new identity drafted, one that even covered for his doctorate. It wasn't super exciting, being a shrink in Jersey; he didn't even think he had any mob clients yet. But it had been time for a break, and it was a break Eddie took, looking on in amusement and definitely not envy as Ben and Bev posted pictures of increasingly improbable cat-themed burglaries to the group chat. Mike and ghost-Stan had ended up in the North Carolina swamps, last time they'd checked in, chasing some lead on resurrection or something better. Bill, in contrast, seemed to be spending most of his free time either writing or apologizing to his wife, so not everybody was leading a more exciting life than Eddie, at least.

The only person who hadn't texted or called was Richie. The Joker. Even an hour away in Gotham, nobody had heard a peep from him since their Arkham escape six months ago. Eddie wasn't _worried_ , exactly. He knew first-hand how absurdly effective Joker's survival instincts were. What he was less sure of was how Richie-as-Joker was handling things. Had he gone back to what counted for him as normal now? The quiet suggested otherwise. Eddie doubted he'd do anything drastic, but he wouldn't have pegged Stan for suicidal, either, so maybe he really was a shitty shrink. 

"Dr. Crane?" Oh, right. It was taking a while to get used to the new name, though Eddie did appreciate that people could spell this one. 

"Yes?" Swiveling his chair from the window to the door, he saw that his receptionist had poked her head into his office, which meant this was definitely not the first time she had tried calling 'his' name. 

"There's a call for you on line one. A new patient, a Mr. Hunt. First name 'Michael.'" In the cold, dark recesses of Eddie's heart, a dim light began to flicker. 

"I'll see what Mr. Hunt needs, thanks." The receptionist backed out of his office, and Eddie stared at the blinking light on his phone. It could, of course, just be an unlucky bastard named Mike Hunt. He'd probably need psychiatric help, too. Well. Different psychiatric help. 

Or.

Maybe it wasn't. 

Eddie flexed his hand and watched the light flicker. 

What would Eddie do if it was him? Sure, he was getting a little bored with his current crime-free existence, but was he bored _enough_? 

Did he really want to open himself back up to the _Joker_ , of all people?

Fuck.

Eddie picked up the phone before he could stop himself again.

"This is Dr. Crane. I understand you want to make an appointment as a new patient. Can you give me an idea of what you'd like to focus on?"

There were an agonizing few seconds of dead silence. 

Then. 

" _Thank God you can see me, doctor. I've just been so sad lately. Nothing seems to lift my spirits like it used to. I just feel so alone, so hopeless._ " Despite himself, Eddie could feel his mouth curling up at the corners, the tiny flame in his chest burning brighter and brighter with every morose word. Nobody really sounded like that. It was a voice. It was _the_ voice, and he'd know it anywhere. Hell, his receptionist would have recognized it in a heartbeat. 

"I have just the thing for you," Eddie said, unable to keep his face from cracking into a full grin, "the circus is in town, you know. You should go see the great clown Pagliacci."

Another beat of dead silence on the other end of the line.

" _But doctor_ ," Richie began, and Eddie burst into peals of helpless laughter as the fire behind his ribs burst into a full inferno. 

**Author's Note:**

> Violence: A very bad man is restrained while someone puts a knife into his brain through his eye socket. It's about as graphic as that, really, not too bad. 
> 
> Character Death: Stanley, but he comes back as a ghost. Eddie is fine. He's FINE. 
> 
> I don't know what to tell you, I watched It 2 and then I read a million fics and then I finally got around to watching Joker and I thought to myself, wouldn't it be funny if a shitty standup comedian with a fear of clowns grew up to be the Joker. Then I thought a lot about Eddie as Riddler for obvious name reasons, but Scarecrow felt like the more thematic choice. Also, I've written Joker/Scarecrow before, probably at least 16 years ago. I'm 31 now. Keep that in mind should you delve. 
> 
> Other things: Eddie had his left amygdala removed and it works because comic books, but those are some side effects of an amygdalatomy.  
> Yes the nurse was Myra
> 
> The title is the punchline to the joke Richie started to tell at the very end. Did you know Watchmen is canonically a comic book in the DC universe, and it's pretty fucked up that they're now real people in that universe? I want Vic to tell Walter to his lack-of-face that he sucks. 
> 
> I'm whollyunnecessary on Tumblr, don't tell anyone I'm related to how you know me.


End file.
